Our say: 'Our game' back for another great season

Apr 02, 2017 | 12:34 PM

Baltimore Orioles' Manny Machado hits a home run in the fifth inning of an exhibition spring training baseball game against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Sarasota, Florida, on Feb. 26, 2017. Baltimore won 8-3. (David Goldman / AP)

We don't care if there's a nip in the air or showers in the forecast. If the spine-tingling sound of bats thwacking into balls covered in cowhide is heard around the country, if fans playing hooky from work cheer when not wolfing down overpriced hot dogs, and if commentators drone on about all teams starting with a zero-zero record — well, spring is here. And summer can't be far behind.

It is time, as Walt Whitman wrote in a newspaper editorial 171 years ago, to "go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms…. The game of ball is glorious."

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Barring rain delays, the "game of ball's" official season starts today for the Washington Nationals at 1:05 p.m., when they host the Miami Marlins. The Baltimore Orioles take the field against the Toronto Blue Jays at Orioles Park at Camden Yards — which, hard as it is to believe, is now a quarter-century old — at 3 p.m.

With all due respect for the fervor football and basketball excite, baseball is the game that goes furthest back in our history, says the most about us and gets closest to our soul. The documentarian Ken Burns' 18 1/2-hour "Baseball" was the most-watched series in public television history, and we like the way Burns put it in a 2014 interview with MLB.com: The sport is "an amazing Rosetta stone of American life ... (that) also happens to deal with race, labor, immigration, advertising, popular culture and the myths we make about ourselves and who we really are."

As for immigration: Baseball developed from games brought to this country by immigrants, and 230 of the 868 players on rosters at the start of Major League Baseball's 2015 season were born outside the United States. As for race: Major League Baseball was integrated before the U.S. armed forces, and when Jackie Robinson stepped on the field in 1947, Burns notes, it was "the first real progress in civil rights since Reconstruction."

As for popular culture: Want to parody heroic poetry? "Casey at the Bat." Want to retell the Faust legend for an American audience? "Damn Yankees." Want to spin a fantasy about the need to reconnect with a simpler past? "Field of Dreams." Want to talk about women entering a realm that had been exclusively male? "A League of the Their Own." Want to dramatize how numbers-crunching changes a traditional business? "Moneyball."

To go back to Whitman, speaking in 1889 to his friend Horace Traubel: "It's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."